OPINION:
If Democrats truly believed they had a chance to impeach President Donald Trump, they wouldn’t launch an impeachment inquiry — they’d call for a vote.
Right? But guess what.
They did that back in July. And it failed.
A resolution to impeach the president brought by Rep. Al Green from Texas went down in flames, 332-95.
So now Democrats have taken to Plan B and kicked off the alarming sounding “impeachment inquiry” — meaning, they’re looking for a pathway toward impeachment.
Meaning, they don’t have the goods to impeach just yet. So they’re going on a search.
Meaning, Trump’s quite right to tweet: “They (Dems) are scrambling for a theme and narrative. They’ve gone everywhere from Russian Hoax to Russian Collusion … and now they’ve come to this … they think they should have won the 2016 election, they think in their bizarre brains that they did …”
This attempt to impeach, which comes by way of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s directive to six Democrat-led committees to gather evidence and give it to Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler — who will help decide whether or not to go forward with formal impeachment proceedings — is about Trump’s telephone call with the Ukrainian president.
But just hours after announcing the inquiry, Democrats were already put on the defensive.
Trump not only vowed to release the transcript of his call, a la “nothing to see here, go home, folks” attitude. But he’s also pivoted the negatives into positives.
Impeachment, he said, in the aftermath of Pelosi’s announced inquiry, is “a positive for me.” And as he pointed out: How can you impeach when “you haven’t even seen the phone call” transcripts, yet?
That is the question.
How can an impeachment go forth absent any impeachable offense?
That’s a question the Democrats have been struggling to address since Trump, Day One. They’ve yet to come up with a suitable solution.
They’ve yet to go forward with an impeachment call that doesn’t put the cart before the horse.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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